There is a hidden gem in Columbus, Georgia, at Fort Benning. It is a museum called the National Infantry Museum, and it looks like it.
It has the quintessential museum-dome, but it is an exterior dome, making up the massive front porch. It has huge front columns made of granite, but when it is wet they look like cinder blocks. It is impressive and meaningful, and it is real, earthy, uncomplicated. The Infantry Museum is anything but aloof.
Going inside you will find history come to life, a truly humbling experience seeing artifacts from wars hundreds of years ago. Seeing the first armored truck that looks like a Model T with sheet metal all over it, walking under the first gliders ever used by the army, and noticing how few people were there to take it all in.
It’s a high end facility, some say it was over $100 million to build.
As you walk in, you come straight to a long, winding ramp that slopes up and carries you through time, from the first infantrymen of the Revolutionary War, all the way through to the modern tanks and armored trucks of the Iraqi War.
It is so realistic that there are stories of soldiers coming back to the museum after many years off the front lines and experiencing a PTSD-induced panic attack. One soldier came to the Iraq exhibit and melted, crawling up into the armored truck and weeping for his friends who died when an IED exploded on a truck exactly like that one. Turns out he was the only survivor.
There is a Blackhawk down, there is a jungle from Vietnam, there is Normandy.
And the reason the museum was built was to honor the graduates of Fort Benning, to connect them with the untold past.
Outside there is a field where the new soldiers graduate, and in that field is some of the dirt of all the major battlefields the army has encountered.
As the soldiers graduate, they walk across the history of sacrifice, into the future of freedom.
This is our country. At it’s best, it is great and it honors greatness. It is uncomplicated and clear. It stands for freedom and prosperity.
And yet there is a cost.
And there is failure.
Not all soldiers came home. Not all wars were “necessary”. Not all battles were clean.
Civilians die.
Nations are crushed and then given hope by a Hitler who gives his people hope and a vision for a great future.
History is just as messy as the politics that drives it.
And yet, there in Columbus is a museum that doesn’t really look like a museum. It’s filled with stories that may not all be exactly true. It is an imperfect institution honoring an imperfect country, telling the hardest stories we have to tell.
In the midst of the imperfection, we find stories of honor, sacrifice, and patriotism. Of love and brotherhood that civilians can’t completely understand.
The day we forget about that museum, and the stories it tells—with all their messiness and imperfection—is the day we lose not just our country, but the economy and freedom that have made it great.